Homecoming / Back to Limerick with the McCourt brothers of 'Angela's Ashes' fame

Ron Fimrite

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, December 14, 2003

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The McCourts: Michael, Malachy and Frank at the library dedication

The McCourts: Michael, Malachy and Frank at the library dedication

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Photo by Joan McCourt

Photo by Joan McCourt

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Small boats moor in The Shannon by grand stone buildings including a castle, Limerick, The Republic of Ireland. ca. 1970-1995 Limerick, Ireland

Small boats moor in The Shannon by grand stone buildings including a castle, Limerick, The Republic of Ireland. ca. 1970-1995 Limerick, Ireland

Photo: Adam Woolfitt

Homecoming / Back to Limerick with the McCourt brothers of 'Angela's Ashes' fame

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Squeezed into the backseat, Michael McCourt watches in amazement as the rental car driven by his brother Malachy becomes hopelessly stalled in traffic just outside Limerick, the brothers' ancestral home.

"When we were kids," says Mike, "a traffic jam was a man on a bicycle with a dog running alongside."

The car is trapped in an unexpectedly fancy neighborhood. Stone fences protect fine old houses, some in the Georgian manner, at the entrance to the city. They have names - Stonebridge, Kensington - not numbers to identify them. "Richard Harris lived here as a boy," says Malachy of the late film actor. "Frank punched him in the nose once in my bar in New York."

The car inches forward. "I do remember that we had a traffic cop in town," says Frank McCourt. "He waved his arms like Toscanini. Then they installed the first traffic light. We all rushed down to marvel at the wonder of it - lights blinking on and off, like magic."

The brothers are driving into town for a weeklong visit after deplaning at Shannon Airport, where, with the help of The Chronicle's Stanton Delaplane, Irish coffee was first concocted. The bustling little city of 70,000 is not the Limerick Frank recalled so unforgettably in his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, "Angela's Ashes." Nor is it the "fetid slum" of Malachy's book, "A Monk Swimming."

"Just look at the people," says Mike, as pedestrians speed by the immobilized auto. "Back then, you could always pick out American tourists because they were so much better dressed. Now everyone here looks the same - natty."

The McCourts have come a long way, in every sense, from the starving urchins they once were on the streets of Limerick. Frank, 73, is, of course, a world-famous author; "Angela's Ashes" has been translated into 29 languages and has sold an estimated 8 million copies worldwide. Malachy, 72, has written his own best-selling memoir and achieved concomitant fame as an actor, boulevardier and television talk-show performer.

"I had Sean Connery as a guest on a show I was hosting," he recalls. "And he went on and on about what a terrible time he had deciding whether to be an actor or a professional soccer player. I saw my opening. "So, Sean,' I inquire, "which one did you choose?' "

Michael, 68, enjoys quite a different sort of celebrity as San Francisco's favorite bartender. It is a role he has played expertly for the better part of more than 30 years, for he, too, is something of an actor, onstage "behind the plank" five days a week. He is the storyteller supreme, a continuing source of rich material for generations of newspaper columnists, an off-the-wall philosopher in the time-honored tradition of saloon sages.

Mike's disciples have followed him faithfully from Perry's on Union street (21 years there) to Monroe's to Seals' Cove to the Buchanan Grill to the fabled Washington Square Bar & Grill, where he currently dispenses generous doses of wit, wisdom and spirits to a regular clientele he gleefully calls "the near-dead." Seeing him in the company of his talented brothers adds another dimension to his expansive persona.

The occasion for this particular family reunion is the presentation of Frank's gift to the University of Limerick of a collection of books, periodicals, paintings and engravings about the city, 4,000 items in all worth 150,000 euros, or about $175,000. The collection was assembled over 33 years by a bibliophilic Limerick priest, Father John Leonard. Frank agreed to buy it for the university on the condition it be housed in a room named in the memory of the McCourt brothers' posthumously famous mother, Angela.

Needless to say, the university was more than willing to make this concession. Founded only in 1972, it is a mere sapling in Old World groves of academe, obliged to compete at a disadvantage with more established institutions for literary collections. And Frank McCourt is not only the recipient of an honorary doctorate there, but also a director of its fund- raising arm, the University of Limerick Foundation, a post in which he mistakenly believed "all I had to do was look benevolent."

So Frank invited his brothers and their wives to join him and his wife, Ellen, for the dedication ceremonies. The entourage includes Mike and his model-pretty wife, Joan; Malachy and his charming Diana and Frank's sister-in- law, Mara, and her lawyer husband, Steve Klein. I am along for the ride and the pleasure of their company. Missing is the youngest McCourt brother, Alphie, 64, who is away elsewhere on business.

Together, the traveling McCourts make an interesting tableau. All have still-flourishing mops of white hair. Malachy and Mike are ruddy and robustly stoutish. Frank is paler and leaner, a snappy dresser. Malachy will burst into song at the slightest provocation, but he is hardly the roistering boozer of "A Monk Swimming." Like Mike, he is now a teetotaler.

"Worse yet," says Mike, "he practices yoga and is on some sort of exotic diet. He will preach to me as I sit before a heaping plate, "Surely you're not going to eat all that, are you?" And I will proudly reply, "Yes, I certainly am.' "

All three have a finely tuned sense of irony. They are, like most truly funny men, entirely serious, but with a quick grasp of the absurd. They share a mutual respect and affection, but there appears to be no firm familial chain of command, each democratically expressing what Frank wryly defines as "sibling hostility." The only real leader of the Limerick expedition is Frank's wife, Ellen, an attractive, vibrant woman whose organizational skills are sorely tested.

Many of us return at one time or another to our beginnings, if only at school reunions. But the McCourts come back to Limerick not so much to recapture their youth as to be reminded of how utterly strange and otherworldly it was. And yet in the cool air and dark streets of the city, those early years re-emerge with startling clarity. "Everywhere I look," says Frank, "images of the past are superimposed on what is here now."

The Limerick they rediscover this time is barely recognizable. The Gothic churches still stand, along with many of the old pubs. King John's castle on the Shannon, built for that despised English monarch early in the 13th century but never occupied by him, is there, refurbished now as a tourist attraction. But there are new buildings, like the Clarion Hotel, where the McCourts stay. It glistens metallically above the city, a small skyscraper that looks like a giant upturned cigarette lighter. The slums where once the McCourts dwelled are gone, the tumbledown neighborhoods gentrified.

Like much of Ireland, Limerick, founded in the 10th century as a Viking fortress, is prospering in the 21st century as a center of technology. Ireland is second only to the United States in the exportation of computer software and has surpassed England in per capita income. For the first time in its history, it is actually importing labor.

In downtown Limerick, hordes of young businesspeople are seen hurrying somewhere important. "Long ago," says Mike, "the only creatures who seemed to know exactly where they were going were the little brown dogs you found rounding every street corner by themselves."

The good gray city lies hard by the island's longest river, the Shannon. "As a teenager working in a storeroom along the river," says Malachy, "I'd stare out over the water as if in a dream, knowing that the Shannon led to the Atlantic Ocean and the Atlantic led to New York City, and that's where I wanted to be. Then some supervisor would bang me hard on the shoulder, rudely rousing me to the grim reality of my situation."

Malachy did make it to New York, though, in 1952, three years after his older brother. Both live there now, neighbors on Manhattan's West Side. Mike followed Malachy to New York in 1954, then after duty in the U.S. Air Force and a wild stint behind Malachy's bar, he moved first to Los Angeles and finally, blessedly, to San Francisco.

The McCourts traipse through Limerick's cobbled lanes and alleyways under clear skies and with a crisp wind off the Shannon behind them. The autumn rains have unaccountably parted, but the air yet smells of dampness.

Mike poses with hand over heart at the doorstep of the once-forbidding Loamy School, where stick-wielding masters held him in terror. "The Halls of Ivy," he says with mock reverence. "Alma mater dear." The cold stone school has lately been transformed into a not unpleasant office building.

"There's the place on Hartsonge Street where little Oliver died," says Malachy of one of three McCourt offspring to die in infancy. "And there's the Ôlying in' hospital where Mike was born. Mam had him there because we didn't want him cluttering up the house."

One image from the past that remains at least artificially intact is the two-room "family hovel" at the foot of Roden Lane. When water from the winter rains rushed downhill, flooding the lower floor, the family moved to the bedroom upstairs, where the boys slept in a single bed in the company of "a million fleas." The hovel has been re-created as a popular tourist attraction in a restored Georgian house on Pery Square. "All because of "Angela's Ashes,' " says curator Dorothy Meaney.

A sheet of plastic simulates flood water and a synthetic fire burns in a grate upstairs. In Frank's book, Angela tells her sons, "We'll be warm through the winter months and then we can go downstairs in the springtime if there is any sign of dryness in the walls or the floor. Dad says it's like going away on our holidays to a warm foreign place like Italy."

The brothers look on with interest at this shrine to their misery. There's something wrong here, they agree. "There's a stove and a sink downstairs," says Malachy. "We never had such luxuries." "Right," says Frank. "No sink. No stove. But a faucet."

There's something wrong as well with the nearby W.J. South pub, where the boys' ne'er-do-well father habitually drank up the family dole. "This isn't the way it was at all," complains Frank, gazing bleakly over a pint of Guinness at the Tiffany lamps, brightly colored curtains, polished floors and expensively upholstered furniture. "Why, they've transformed the place into some kind of fancy bordello."

Frank's ire is mildly assuaged when the proprietor, David Hickey, shows him that, in honor of his book, the sign on the door to the gents' room reads "Frank" and the one to the women's room, "Angela." "No one will ever go to the john here," say I, hazarding a quip.

On the street outside, Mike rejoices in receiving the "Limerick nod," a salutation passers-by render with such subtlety as to be "almost imperceptible. " Frank demonstrates with a slight leftward twitch of the head and a blink of the eye, which only the most optimistic of recipients could interpret as a wink.

At the opening of Father Leonard's Collection in the Angela McCourt Room, identified by a plaque in her name, Frank speaks to the assembled academics. He recalls his mother's "most wretched kind of life" and chuckles at the wonderment she must now be expressing "over a glass of sherry in heaven at finding her name prominently displayed in a university library." Indeed, below her plaque she would find the bronzed heads of such Irish literary icons as Sean O'Casey, Liam O'Flaherty and Frank O'Connor. "And she with no more than a grade-school education. She was a great storyteller, though. My brothers and I can remember her coming home from the movies and describing every frame of a film like ÔReap the Wild Wind,' starring John Wayne and Ray Milland. It was a gift she thankfully passed on to her sons."

As the crowd files past to examine the collection, the brothers pose for photographs beneath the plaque, the late-afternoon sun casting a faint spotlight on them through the library windows. Outside the leaves are turning.

"If she were alive," says Malachy, smiling for the cameras, "she'd be cautioning Frank, ÔWhat's this about giving money to a university? Why not give it to the poor instead?' "

"She would," says Mike, "then she'd think on it a minute and finally say, ÔAw, but they'd just drink it all away.' "

There is a dinner party that night at the fine house of university president Roger Downer overlooking the dark Shannon. A most unacademic - and very Irish - atmosphere obtains. Downer is a slender man with slightly protruding teeth. He is cheerful, chatty and quite charming, despite the disadvantage of a Northern Ireland upbringing. Over after-dinner drinks he urges Frank to "favor us all with a song."

Frank obliges, prefacing his selection with a comic history of Limerick tenors - "they were delicate men of great sensitivity who usually lived with their mothers." Then in his own rich tenor voice he melodramatically warbles, "The Rose of Tralee." Malachy, ever ready to perform, follows with a brace of equally sentimental ballads, "Barefoot Days" and "There is an Isle." He sings with great emotion, arms outstretched, the suggestion of a tear in the eye. Ellen McCourt abruptly changes course, belting out an Ethel Merman-ish "I'm a Latin From Manhattan."

Jokes and stories, but no limericks, follow in rapid abundance. Mike describes in hilarious detail how, during his drinking days in Los Angeles, he and some convivial friends decided at roughly 3 in the morning to pay a respectful visit to the graves of W.C. Fields and Al Jolson. They were ejected, he laments, for making enough noise to wake the dead. President Downer tells of a parsimonious couple seeking damages from the zoo after their son, Albert, was eaten by a lion. "Oh," said they, ticking off the losses, "and he had a hat." Father Leonard, well into the mood of the evening, tells a joke in which a banana plays a decisive role, and that might well serve as grounds for his excommunication.

Malachy is on his feet again, this time reciting the malapropisms of Dan Burke, a legendary Limerick mayor and Irish Republican Army soldier.

Uncertain as to how many rifles he has issued to his IRA recruits, Burke barks out, "All those without arms raise your hands." And in a rousing political address before the statue of the sainted Irish "liberator," Daniel O'Connell, Burke tearfully observes, "I see before me men standing here who died for Ireland. And they're walking around without jobs."

Frank closes out the festivities with an improbable rendition of "Meet Me in St. Louis." Even more improbably, the assembled academics and clerics join in.

There's a tour the next day of the university's verdant campus, which straddles the Shannon in wooded splendor. "There were empty fields here when we were boys," says Mike, as a university van conveys us over the sprawling property. "Sometimes we'd come out here for a romp."

Now new buildings are everywhere under construction, the better to accommodate a growing student body of nearly 10,000. Among the most spectacular of the new structures is a gigantic sports arena with a 50-meter pool and three basketball courts. Limerick U. even has a team that plays American football. Sadly enough, it is not nicknamed "The Fighting Irish."

A wine reception follows the tour, and then a lecture by Professor Tom Moylan, first occupant of the university's Glucksman Chair in Contemporary Writing in English. Moylan's topic is the influence of utopian theory on literature and society through the ages. The McCourts anticipate maybe a 15- minute talk. No such luck.

Jet-lagged, sleep-deprived, exhaustively wined and dined, the McCourt party fights gamely, if not always successfully, to remain conscious in a cozily warm lecture hall as Moylan uncorks an hourlong exploration of utopianism that might charitably be described as stupefying.

Chances are, though, had the brothers snored in riotous chorus throughout or even risen from their seats to pelt the merciless lecturer with vegetables, their reception at the university would have been no less cordial, such is their standing today in a community where once they wallowed in humiliating poverty. The fact is, they cannot walk the streets without being besieged by autograph hounds and camera bugs. The Limerick Leader, a newspaper that once denounced "Angela's Ashes" for maligning the city, publishes a flattering welcome-home article. "It didn't hurt," says Mike, "that the reporter [Mike Dwane] once worked with me as a busboy when he lived in San Francisco."

Mike is asked if he will now join his brothers in the Limerick memoir business. "If I do," he says, "I will write of the difficulty we had in hiring decent help, of the decline in the quality of watercress sandwiches, of the trouble we had keeping our palm trees trimmed and of the shamefully low price we received from selling our polo ponies."

It is yet another sunny day when the McCourts take their leave. They are themselves aglow with the warmth of their reception. Outside the Clarion, they share affectionate hugs and congratulate themselves for a trip, as Mike says, "without a hint of negativity."

Frank packs luggage into one rental car, Malachy stands at the door of another. It remains for Malachy, the actor, to have the last line. Standing with his back to the Shannon, the river of his youthful daydreams, he stretches his arms out to the teeming city as if to embrace it.